WASHINGTON The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly
and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of
the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change
report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

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The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet
been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of
climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President
Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to
climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects
is limited.

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Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to
the depths of the oceans, a draft of the report states. A copy of it was
obtained by The New York Times.

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The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands
of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air.
Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially
emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible
for recent observed climate change, they wrote.

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The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the
National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four
years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft
report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump
administration to release it.

WASHINGTON Government scientists agree that, contrary to President Donald
Trump and his teams repeated claims, climate change is already having a
dramatic effect in the U.S., according to a new report.

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The New York Times published an unreleased draft of the report Monday. The
543-page report was written by scientists from 13 federal agencies,
including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. It concludes that temperatures in the U.S.
have risen sharply, by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit, over the last 150 years and
that it is extremely likely that most of the global mean temperature
increase since 1951 was caused by human influence on climate.

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With very high confidence, the scientists concluded that the magnitude of
climate change beyond the next few decades depends primarily on the
additional amount of greenhouse gases emitted globally.

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Also, the frequency of extreme weather events, including heavy rain and
heat waves, have increased and are very likely to continue to do so. And
since 1880, global sea levels have risen 8 to 9 inches roughly 3 of those
inches since 1990 with human activity playing a substantial role,
according to the report.

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In a post to Twitter, Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of
the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that nothing in the
report is surprising for people working in the field but that it may be
shocking to those that think [climate change] is just a future problem.

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The report delivers a strikingly different message than the one being
pushed by Trump and his Cabinet members, who continue to downplay the
urgency of the threat as they work toward energy dominance. Since taking
office, Trump who famously called climate change bullshit and a Chinese
hoax has moved quickly to derail Americas actions to combat climate
change, including rolling back President Barack Obamas Clean Power Plan, a
policy limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Trump has
pegged himself as a savior of Americas dying coal industry and has vowed
to increase oil and gas production, opening now-protected areas of the
Arctic and Atlantic oceans to drilling.

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In June he announced plans to pull the U.S. out of the historic Paris
Agreement on climate change ? the international accord in which nearly 200
countries committed to slashing carbon emissions in an effort to prevent
global temperatures from increasing 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial
levels, the line scientists say the world must stay below to stave off the
very worst effects of climate change.

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Meanwhile, his Cabinet members have refused to say whether Trump believes
climate change is real and continue to question how much the scientific
community understands about the threat and the role humans play in
observed changes.

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